An “animal mad” woman who was the driving force behind a charity set up to mainly re-home cats and kittens has died of cancer, aged 76.
The funeral took place on Thursday June 13 of Joyce Walker, the founder of Keswick-based Pets Life Line, at Crosthwaite Parish Church.
It is a charity that since being set up in the late 1970s has re-homed between 8,000 and 9,000 cats and kittens.
“Mum has always had a fascination with animals. She was animal mad,” said Joyce’s only daughter, Kathleen. “We used to help Animal Concern a long time ago but then there was a mother cat and six kittens found by the lake.
“The mother had been battered to death and we took in the kittens that were two to three days old. We hand reared four of them. That is when the charity started. Mum decided that it is what she wanted to do.”
Mrs Walker was born at Yew Tree Cottage –now the Yew Tree restaurant – at Seatoller in the Borrowdale Valley. She attended Borrowdale School as an infant and later Lairthwaite School in Keswick. She met her husband, David, who was a warden at Honister Youth Hostel, as she was out walking her dog and he was riding his bike on Honister Pass. Mrs Walker was 18 and he was 23 when they married at St Andrew’s Parish Church at Stonethwaite.
For around 14 years Mrs Walker ran a three-bed guest house on Chestnut Hill in Keswick while her husband was a sales representative working mainly for McClures in Windermere. She also had spells working as a shop assistant at Woolworths in Keswick and Horn’s toy shop in the town. Her husband David died four-and-a-half years ago.
Mrs Walker died at her home in Crosthwaite Gardens on Tuesday May 28. She had two grandchildren – Joseph, 30, and Sammie, 29 – and three great grandchildren – Jayden, 12, Arabella, five, and 10-month-old Connie.
“You knew when you had upset her. If she did not like you then you knew about it,” said Kathleen. “She did the choosing about who got the cats and the homes. She was just here for the cats. If anything came in as an emergency, no matter what you were doing, that got dealt with first.”
